In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads—in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. — Jacques Barzun

The Cost of a College Education

Ilya Somin makes the case against government subsidies for college tuition at the Volokh Conspiracy. His point is that the higher-than-inflation increases in the cost of college over the past forty years are justified by the even greater increases in expected returns on a college education. According to a 2002 Census Bureau study, a college graduate, on average, earns $1,000,000 more than a high school graduate over his/her lifetime.

2 Responses

The laptop is at least determined by real market forces outside the college – and particularly by the recent past’s nano-breakthroughs requiring less and less materials in its making (chips and boards mostly). But I think there’s good merit to the argument that subsidies increase the unfounded expectations of bureacratic and labor-intensive institutions, by distorting its true supply/demand price determination – thus contributing to the inflation trend of tuition (and thereby making it ever more necessary to add subsidies to continue making it affordable to many students … in an upward spiral).